I want Norm back and I want him back now. I've had enough of losing friends in this town since the storm. Every time I turn around, it seems another somebody is biting the dust here - either moving away, going to jail, or dying. I don't know if the stresses of post-Katrina life drove Norm to get as searingly smashed as he did - I know reporting on this mess we've been going through for three years and counting is enough to drive anyone to drink. But I for one have had enough instability here, enough collateral damage. And quite honestly, I've had enough of looking at that blonde woman sitting in his anchor chair staring back at me with those black eyebrows.

Norm is one of us. You see him all over town at major events. He's approachable, funny, generous, and just an all around good guy. And he doesn't take any mess. I remember during the last mayoral race when Nagin was squawking into every mic around town that the "Chocolate City" and "I don't 'care what the people in Uptown want..." statements he made during his infamous Martin Luther King Day speech were in response to certain White business leaders who'd outwardly said to him that they wanted the complexion of the city changed. This was basically the only strategy "Our Mayor" (that thinly-veiled suggestive moniker) had, was to run a racially divisive campaign to save his job. But Norm didn't seem to buy it and called him out on it during a mayoral debate WDSU hosted:

Norm asked him point blank: "Did they say it to your face? Did you hear it with your own ears?"

A huge contradiction from what the Mayor - if that's what we're still insisting on calling him these days - had been telling voters. But Norm didn't fall for Nagin's BS. And he didn't fall back on what would have been a predictable status quo move, a Black man giving another brother a pass in order to help keep a Black figurehead in the mayor's position. He did his job as a reporter and uncovered the truth.

Perhaps, as one reader suggested, Norm was doing a story on DUI when he flipped his car. Now THAT would be great reporting!